The Worst Anime of Fall 2025

There's no way to avoid it; the fall anime season had a clear winner for most disappointing, poorly executed, and least entertaining. You'll find it at the bottom of this list and nod, knowingly, that it's where it should be. The other four anime included here might be a matter of taste, the result of an incomprehensible script, or bland animation it what is supposed to be an engaging action spectacle. But that #1 choice? You know what it is.

Have you ever experienced a piece of art and felt nothing in response to it? It's a really distinct, frustrating feeling to take in something you know was made by human hands and supposedly meaningful to the people who worked on it, and have nothing stir inside of you as you take it in. When this occurs with an anime, I'd describe the feeling as similar to being gaslit; like I'm somehow the crazy one for not even being able to understand why people bothered to endure the herculean task of animation production to bring a work into the world that has no appeal to it whatsoever from my perspective.

Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota made me feel absolutely nothing, which inspired a fair bit of the alienating dread described above, and is motivating me to label it one of the worst anime of the fall 2025 season.

The thing that first keyed me into just how unaffecting Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota would be is how empty this anime feels. The staging and blocking in this show are amateurish, and there are so many shots with a distracting amount of negative space. This issue is only exacerbated by the fairly washed-out color palette the anime uses, as the lack of colorful or otherwise attention-grabbing character designs makes everything in a given shot fade into a beige collage.

It also doesn't help that most of the humor in this romcom comes from miscommunication or characters' inability to express their feelings. Kashiwada is quiet and shy, while Oota is brash and loud. It's not super clear why these opposites are attracted to each other. Still, the show will keep putting them in situations where they can pantomime being cute, despite not actually having any on-screen chemistry. If you've watched this show and genuinely laughed at the scene where Oota tries to scare Kasiwada with a white-sheet ghost get-up that makes their teacher think they're having sex, please let me know what about it worked for you, because I was staring blankly at the screen.

To be perfectly blunt, this anime feels like it exists only because we're in the midst of a content glut, with production companies incentivized to produce as much anime as possible right now. If the industry were to course correct and begin producing anime at a more sustainable output, Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota would be one of the first titles winnowed. Nothing on display makes me feel like this was someone's passion project, or that any creativity beyond the bare minimum required to make a straightforward anime adaptation went into it. Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota feels like it doesn't expect the audience to have any reaction to this work, and that makes it one of the worst of the season.

—Lucas

For all the many things you can criticize it for, you can't accuse Ninja vs. Gokudo of false advertising. For better or for worse, you definitely get fights between ninja and gokudo (the latter of which, in this case, is synonymous with yakuza). Several of them, in fact. Because you truly don't get much of anything else whatsoever. And even with those fights you get, there's hardly anything in the way of connective tissue, let alone a coherent story.

I seriously can't emphasize enough how little I'm exaggerating when I say that in Ninja vs. Gokudo, you get a constant onslaught of fights between ninja and gokudo—plenty of whom you've only just or barely met—and pretty much nothing else. That's actually it. There's virtually no time in between these fights to breathe, let alone ample time to get to know any characters before they inevitably meet their blood-soaked end, or for a story to form. There's a half-hearted attempt at a star-crossed besties storyline that's peppered throughout the series, but it feels so forced and manufactured that it almost comes off as comical.

Because there are so many of them happening so much, the fights quickly lose their sparkle, too. Just about every single one is treated as a massive deal, but when all of them are such a massive deal, are any of them really? Rather than dramatic, it just makes the series come off as tired and exhausting—not to mention how hyper-aware it quickly makes you that the stakes have to be raised artificially like this because there's nothing in the series that naturally accomplishes this. Because it's allergic to ceding more than the barest minimum amount of time it can get away with to literally anything but more fights that the characters totally swear are super important.

But to its credit, Ninja vs. Gokudo knows how to have a good time, and sometimes that poor writing can weirdly be a bit charming. It got a few chuckles out of me, not because it made any great jokes, but because of the sheer absurdity of some of the things that happened in some of the fights. Just about everyone we meet has some type of overpowered ability or gimmick, so after a while, you just can't help but start laughing at it all. It's no stranger to veering off into the over-the-top, and it's honestly a pretty solid watch if you just want to turn your brain off with something action-y and fun. Still, the millisecond you give things even the smallest bit of thought, or start wondering if it's ever going to explain anything properly, or if there's ever going to be any kind of story-like structure, you're quickly going to find yourself disappointed.

—Kennedy

As is often the case, a good premise done poorly aggravates me far more than a premise that simply doesn't appeal to me, and Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle ticks me off. For context, this is an Oregairu-like: a dialogue-forward and character-based drama about a male high school protagonist who meddles with the various psychological foibles of his adolescent peers for ultimately benevolent reasons. Speaking as someone who appreciates cleverly written conversations between realistically layered characters in my fiction, I tend to enjoy these types of shows.

Chitose's “spin” on the genre is that, instead of its hero being a weird antisocial guy, the titular Chitose is super popular and loved by everyone, students and teachers alike. In practice, though, this doesn't matter as much as the series thinks it does. The protagonists in these stories are, by nature, arrogant and nosy, and most writers compensate for this by knocking them down a peg or two. Hachiman is a curmudgeon who gets constant pushback. Araragi is a pervert who gets constantly owned. Etcetera. Chitose feels too perfect, and the story, in turn, feels too frictionless. It gives lip service to interpersonal conflicts, but the writing, florid yet shallow, never develops them in a meaningfully complex way. While I can see how this could be comforting to some, it is supremely annoying to me. Sorry!

The first arc is a good encapsulation of why the show chafes my tastes. Ostensibly, the focal point is Kenta, a bitter shut-in otaku incel, who becomes a new guy with a social life and support structures thanks to Chitose's meddling. I agree insofar as this is an appropriate conflict for Chitose to solve, using his sunny friendliness to pull someone else out of their antisocial darkness. However, these ambitions crash against the simplicity of the writing. Both Kenta and Chitose morph into mouthpieces espousing the most juvenile incarnations of their respective problems and solutions. It possesses all the depth and conviction of a Hallmark card. Even its most affecting scene, where Kenta confronts his old toxic friend group, suffers and collapses when Chitose swoops in to save the day. The narrative doesn't put in the work to earn these wins, and it turns into a treacly glob of trite observations. For all its bluster, its only conviction is to glaze its hero.

The show's saving grace is a very nice adaptation from Yūji Tokuno, which does an especially good job utilizing the softness of raemz's character designs. However, that too is a poison pill, as production issues delayed the sixth episode's airing for a whole month. To be fair, that issue is hardly unique to Chitose, but it's another factor that makes the series easy not to recommend. Season your food and go watch Monogatari.

—Steve Jones

Man, Dusk Beyond the End of the World was a show that I desperately wanted to like, and on paper, it had a lot of things going for it. It was an anime original made by P.A. Works, which has a generally solid track record in that department, and it's set in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi world, which is generally my cup of tea. The show was even helmed by Naokatsu Tsuda, the director responsible for much of the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure adaptation by david production, and it features all the over-the-top action sequences you'd expect from that pedigree. There's a lot here that feels like it should have all the makings of a great show, and as far as the technical aspects of its production go, I have nothing negative to say about it.

Alas, for as gorgeous as this show looks, it's let down by its script. While Naokatsu Tsuda is a great director, the same can't be said for his writing, and the story here is a mess of ideas that fail to connect into anything meaningful or even coherent. Given that the show is set after the fallout of a failed AI revolution that destroyed most of the world and left its remnants under the thumb of an authoritarian government that's willing to go to violent extremes to suppress the knowledge of any electronics-based technology, you'd think it might have something about how the current push for AI across all sectors of the free market is hastening our own destruction, or how fascist governments try to control the flow of information to maintain power, but largely just comes off as very wishy-washy about the ideas it presents. The main perpetrator of the AI apocalypse is also the character the show wants viewers to feel the most sympathy for, even when nearly every new issue that caused this apocalypse can be traced back to her actions, and the government reigning over this ruined future is ultimately revealed to be morally grey at worst, with those who are willing to kill in order to maintain the status quo of information control being painted simply as bad apples rather than symptoms of a corrupt system.

About the only thing the show has to say is in regard to romantic relationships, as another aspect of its future is that the traditional idea of marriage has been changed into an elshea, where people are completely free to choose how many and what kinds of partners they want. While the show does attempt to use this to explore various forms of romantic connections, nearly aĺl of them fail to be compelling, whether it be a constantly bickering lesbian couple, a couple in the middle of a failing relationship that feel like they should have never tied the knot to begin with, or incest that it attempts to frame as genuinely romantic (with the instance of childhood friends who later grew up as siblings somehow being treated as a bigger taboo than the pair of actual blood siblings wanting to hook up).

This also extends to the main trio of Akira, Yugure and Amoru, as the show tries really hard to sell the former two as its central romance despite how much of their dynamic feels forced, while Amoru is obsessed with having the three of them form into a polyamorous relationship, an idea that the story generally frames as a negative, largely insisting that love can only ever truly be shared between two people. For a show that seems to want to say “love is love,” it's weird to see it be so regressive about polyamory. And while that take would make it easier to hate what it's preaching, it's also a stance the show doesn't even fully commit to. Instead it ends by ambiguously toying with the idea of them becoming a threesome anyway, and while it should be easy to interpret this as the show fully embracing its theme that there are many forms of love out there, it's such a hard swerve from where it stood up to that point that it rather than coming off as a shift in perspective that the series was building towards, it instead feels like it backed off of saying much about it at all.

Ultimately, this is a show that just feels extremely confused about what it wants to be and, in the process, walks away without saying much of anything. The more I think about this show, the more I'm baffled by its decisions. While this hasn't diminished my respect for Naokatsu Tsuda as a director, I'd be lying if I said it hasn't made me at least a little less enthusiastic about checking out his future projects.

—Jairus Taylor

I dreaded writing this part of the Fall anime review. Like many others, I was blown away by Studio Madhouse and director Shingo Natsume's phenomenal first season anime adaptation of ONE and Yūsuke Murata's One-Punch Man manga. Four years later, after production had moved to J.C. Staff for the second season, I was concerned that the quality would suffer. While it certainly did, I still thought the second season was mostly okay, though it severely lacked the verve and wow factor of the first.

After a further six-year break, OPM finally returns for its third season, remaining with J.C. Staff but switching directors again. It's not a spoiler to report that very little of what made OPM's first season so special still remains in what, in comparison, is an anemic, hollowed-out husk of a corpse. OPM season 3's dearth of any kind of energy, of vitality, of even any content of interest, is frankly heartbreaking. I'm honestly at the point now where I wish it hadn't been made. For a show named after Saitama, a self-made superhero who defeats every enemy with one punch, he's barely in it. And when he is, it's as the punchline to some lame jokes rather than him doing anything. For the first few episodes, as with much of the second season, “hero hunter” Garou might as well be the protagonist. That's mostly fine; he's a fairly fun antihero who is neither a typical monster nor a hero… yet eventually his wavering between his desire to attain monsterhood and his conscience starts to feel repetitive. His battles against various enemies this season are embarrassingly poorly animated, mostly reduced to stills and him sliding across the screen like a static game sprite.

I don't understand the reasoning behind the decision to starve the animators of OPM season 3 of the resources needed to produce even a half-competent-looking production. Apart from a tiny handful of blink-and-you'll miss-them cuts of decent quality animation (roughly about one percent, if that, of each episode), for an action-heavy show, this is an embarrassment. It doesn't help that most of the first half of the season comprises groups of characters talking at one another about what they need to do, instead of just doing it. I've lost count of how many times I had to jolt myself awake as I found myself losing consciousness due to boredom. An anime can be bad and still have some kind of value (even if merely as a target for ridicule), but OPM S3 is plain boring, and that's an unforgivable tragedy. Even though the action attempts to heat up past the second half, it's too little too late. If I hadn't been obliged to write about it today, I'd have dropped the show at episode three and never looked back.

—Kevin Cormack